Lucie White is the Louis A. Horvitz Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. After working for two decades on US social welfare law, she turned to the issue of extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, in 1999 she launched the Harvard Law School’s Ghana project, which is on-going. The project brings together Ghanaian partners and student teams to work on the realization of economic and social rights for Ghana’s least advantaged groups. After working on health finance and mental health, the group turned to the oil industry’s economic and human impacts and geographical inequities in primary education grounded in histories of northern Ghanians’ enslavement and colonial exploitation. In 2010 she built on this work to found the “Stones of Hope” project. This is a collaboration among African human rights activists and global rights scholars to examine African innovations in Economic and Social Rights advocacy. The project culminated in L. White and J. Perelman eds., Stones of Hope: African Lawyers Use Human Rights to Challenge Global Poverty (Stanford University Press, 2010). Subsequently she took part in a number of Harvard Institute of Global Law and Policy initiatives, including a long term research project on human rights and heterodox development. More recently she has received an Open Society grant to work with South African activists to envision a “new South African constitutionalism”. She is currently working on a series of personal essays about growing up as a white girl in Jim Crow. She has received several fellowships and awards and written widely about everyday life, law, and social movement among marginalized groups, particularly those with histories of race subordination, enslavement, and colonization.

Project: Contest and Negotiation Over Urban Futures: An Experiment